Re: Centralized darcs
On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 09:41:02AM +0200, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> #include <hallo.h>
> * John Goerzen [Tue, Aug 01 2006, 04:47:13PM]:
>
> > I do use darcs to track patches against upstream. I really don't
> > understand the whole cdbs/dpatch/whatever thing -- why use a hack to
> > manage your patches when you could use a real VC tool that does it
> > better?
>
> Because you can make your work persistent in atoms without having a
> complicated meta layer inbetween. Patching with VC works well (even with
> Subversion) if you have just few lines to change (basic use case while
> developing svn-buildpackage) but the fun disappears when you have a
> dozen of patches from different sources.
Actually, I think this is where darcs really shines.
Keep in mind that, to darcs, a repository is a collection of patches.
Darcs also has a notion of patch dependencies. So you can actually do
things like revert a given patch and all later patches that depend upon
it. This dependency support is pretty much automatic.
So not only do you get to manage your project's current patches, but you
get history and merging tools for free.
Note that darcs is, at its heart, a patch management system rather than
a history system. Each patch does have a timestamp, but darcs
repositories are, fundamentally, just collections of patches. The
patches don't necessarily have to be applied in the same order (for
instance, it doesn't matter if you apply the patch that creates file A
or file B first), though its dependencies ensure that they are applied
in the correct order when necessary.
Really, I think that getting patches in darcs from people that are using
"darcs send" is not only easier for me as a maintainer, but also easier
for them as contributors. Plus it is really easy for people that don't
grok darcs to just use normal tools to edit Debian source packages,
create diffs, NMU packages, or whatever -- and for me to integrate their
changes later. This is not the case for the other special-purpose patch
tools.
> I get scared sometimes when I hear people talking proudly about managing
> their project using a distributed VCS as framework to link dozens of
> patch layers together though I admittedly never tried to recreate a such
I don't know what you mean by a "patch layer".
> scenario. It sounds like a lot of overhead and big waste of time from
> the beginning, sorry.
I don't know where you get that idea.
As I make changes, I "darcs record" them.
I use dbp-importorig to import new upstream sources -- this is just a
script that untars them and uses darcs_load_dirs to import them as a
changeset to the upstream branch. I use "darcs pull" (the darcs merge
command) to pull it into my Debian tree, and that's that.
-- John
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